Impossible Crimes are Mystery stories that appear to be supernatural but turn out to be explainable. These stories have a way of shoving people off the fence to land on one side or the other. Readers quickly decide they prefer real horror to the ridiculous explanation. Or they forsake all horror dressings, and preferring Mysteries to take place in ordinary settings. For the lucky few, you stay on the fence.
The Gothic Novel
The rationally explained Mystery has a long history. The Gothic novel was created by Horace Walpole in 1765, but it was Ann Radcliffe who channeled the supernatural genre into the rational. These were labeled Gothic explique, the explained Gothic. Her masterwork, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) offers up a young woman, Emily St. Aubert, trapped in a dark manse (for about a third of the book) where she suffers from supposed horrors like the Black Veil. The shadowy figure turns out to be a dress mannequin. Later, Jane Austen would poke fun at such books in Northanger Abbey (1817), directing the Gothics off into the Romance category.
The Ghost Story and the Detective Story
But the Gothics didn’t become only the Romance novel. They also split off into the ghost story and the Mystery. Two of the most important men to do this were J. Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irishman who wrote some quasi-Mystery fiction, but fell more to the telling of modern horror tales like “Carmilla” and “Green Tea”. The other was the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe crafted the psychological horror tale in classics like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Telltale Heart” and the first true detective mystery with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. In this single story Poe gave us the occult detective, the impossible crime, the mystery tale and the series detective. Poe wrote three stories of C. Auguste Dupin as well as “The Gold Bug”, a cipher tale that would inspire the most famous detective of all time.
Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle, working from Poe’s small canon, created Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and continued the Impossible Crimes sub-genre. Not all Holmes adventures are supernatural appearing, but a good dozen are. (I wrote an entire article on this here.) His best is the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), which not only inspired an entire library of books after it but also gave us the false monster tale. An apparatus of the Impossible Crime is often the fake creature that proves to be a costume, a murderer or a legend.
The Ghostbreakers
Following in Holmes’ tracks, a whole crew of supernatural detectives sprang up after 1887. Flaxman Low, Moris Klaw, Carnacki, (even Pulp superstar, Jules de Grandin, had cases with natural explanations) these investigators found no ghosts as often as real phantoms. The reader never knew which they would get when reading one of these stories. Was the noises from the basement the spirit of the murdered wife or a gang of thieves using the house as a base of operations? It was this brand of story that M. R. James, the ghost story writer, took a particular dislike to in his introduction to Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923). He liked his side of the fence.
Christie to Chesterton
Despite James’ complaint, there were now several writers of Mystery who enjoyed the murky waters. Agatha Christie was one in her youth, but as time went on she moved away from the Impossible Crime. She would return to it at the end of her career. More famous than Christie for spinning weird crimes was G. K. Chesterton who created Father Brown. Who better than a priest to tangle with the supposed forces of evil? Not all the Father Brown stories have a fake god or faun in them but all have a sense of the strange being possible.
The Pulps and Radio
It is this weirdness, that is often not overt, that will find itself in the Pulps and on the Radio in the works of one man in particular, John Dickson Carr (sometimes as his obvious pen name, Carter Dickson). Carr created four detectives who often stumble upon supernatural appearing crimes: Henri Bencolin, Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale and Captain Marsh. Carr delineated the rules for Impossible Crimes or Locked Room mysteries in his novel,The Three Coffins (1935). Carr had a successful career as a writer for Radio programs like Suspense, where his impossible crimes could play out in 15-30 minute segments.
The Shudder Pulps
The Grand Guignol was back with a vengeance between 1936 and 1944. Saavy publishers realized there was a market for highly graphic stories of blood and torture that appeared to be horror but had those great lame explanations of old. The magazines have been labeled the Shudder Pulps. These stories seem quite purple today but in their time they sold like hotcakes. Writers like Arthur Leo Zagat, Paul Ernst, Wayne Rogers, Hugh B. Cave and others received three times the pay for these creaky, spastic terrors. Terror Tales, Horror Stories and Thrilling Mystery pumped out the mad men, fake monsters, circus freaks and serial killers for most of ten years until the market dripped blood. Then just as suddenly, the magazines went back to ordinary detectives and common criminals. the fact that the Shudder Pulps happened when they did, I can only assume they satisfied some need during the tensions of World War II.
Brown and Bradbury
There are few who could hold a candle to Carr. He was the master. One writer did: Science Fiction writer Fredric Brown. Brown is a two career man, being equally famous in SF and Mystery. He paid his bills writing two Mystery novels a year and spent the rest of his time writing SF as often as possible. Brown’s mysteries often carry that same weirdness that Carr displayed, in novels like Murder can Be Fun (1949) The Screaming Mimis (1950), Night of the Jabberwock (1951) and Madball (1953). His short fiction was no exception with “The Ghost Breakers” being typical of his detective tales. Many of Brown’s pieces feature circuses, Brown having worked in one as a youth. The essence of the freak show can be found here as in the works of Ray Bradbury, who also wrote occasional mysteries for Detective Tales as he filled the pages of Weird Tales magazine.
Alfred Hitchcock and the Paperback
By the 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock was a name associated with suspense in film. The use of his name on collections of fiction began in 1941 with The Pocket Book of Great Detective Stories. These books even made cameos in his film. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Farley Granger is reading a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Fireside Book of Suspense Stories (1947). Once paperbacks became the thing, Dell issued four collections a year, all with horror puns in the titles like A Hangman’s Dozen, 16 Skeletons from My Closet, A Hard Day at the Scaffold, etc. The 1940s collections were a mixture of horror and mystery stories but by the 1960s the collections were basically “The Best of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine“. Authors included horror/Science Fiction alumni such as Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Joseph Payne Brennan, Gerald Kersh, Fredric Brown, Margaret St. Clair, Richard Matheson, Arthur Porges, August Derleth, Henry Slesar, Avram Davidson and Fritz Leiber.
Falling on Hard Times
The Impossible Crimes sub-genre struggled through the 1960s. Partly because the 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in occult interest. Real horror boomed under Stephen King, Ira Levin and William Peter Blatty. Ghostbreakers like Karl Kolchak were on TV. The idea of revealing supernatural beings to be men in masks became the province of Scooby-Doo. Despite some great books like Basil Copper’s Necropolis (1980) it took time for the fence-sitters to return.
Today
The Impossible Crime story never really went away. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine writers like Edward D. Hoch kept the sub-genre alive with characters like Simon Ark. New writers followed in Hoch’s steps with odd detectives like George C. Chesboro’s Mongo the Mighty, a dwarf detective with a circus background. The series ran from 1977 to 2003. Also current is Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series. Rickman does not see himself as a horror writer but clearly borrows from this long tradition of supernatural-appearing events. ITV filmed Midwinter of the Spirit in 2015. Borrowing a vibe from The X-Files, television shows like Evil (2019) play both sides of the street. With the recent boom in “Gothic”material (as opposed to strictly “Horror” material) I can happily await new examples here on my fence post.
